This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening, everyone. My name is Shundell. So I guess I'm going to be looking over this way this evening. Let me start by reading a poem. It's a poem that some of you may know. Some of you may know very well. Some of you may not know. Even now, decades after, I wash my face with cold water. Not for discipline, nor memory, nor the icy awakening slap, but to practice choosing to make the unwanted a wanted. It's called A Cedary Fragrance by Jane Hirschfeld. So... Thank you to Tim for inviting me to give the talk.

[01:00]

Thank you to the Abbots. We have several Abbots senior Dharma teachers, my teacher Zachary, all in attendance. And it's wonderful to be back in the building again. Who is back in this room for a talk for the first time in a while? Anybody? Yes. Sounds different. I walked in here at 7.30 like it was a different kind of silence. It's interesting. And I just had a little peek upstairs. There's new things and old things and beautiful new things and venerable old things. And I would like to dedicate this talk to Peter Schneider, whose name is on the altar, a disciple of Suzuki Roshi, who died just a few days ago. I did meet him a few times when I was living here. He was a very wonderful person, continued teaching. in Northridge, which is a place I think that is struggling at the moment.

[02:01]

So I also want to put our thoughts out to everyone who is in LA and the surrounding areas right now and suffering with the wildfires, which some of us know about. I had a class at noon and two people were closely by the fire areas and so it was a good chance for them to sit. So let me read the poem again. Even now, decades after, I wash my face with cold water, not for discipline, nor memory, nor the icy awakening slap, but to practice choosing to make the unwanted wanted. So this is a poem about Tassajara, for those of you who've been at the training monastery. I believe there is still no warm water in the cabins. I know there is hot water that is extended down to the Zendo bathrooms, which is a new thing, but in the cabins there is no hot water in the sinks.

[03:06]

So you can be prepared and bring a thermos with you in the evening to wash your face in warm water in the morning. I never bothered to do that. I used to have a hot water bottle to warm my bed up, but I never had a thermos to wash my face in warm water. So I wash my face in cold water every day. And it was a great wake up early in the morning, winter and summer, to have that cold water on the face and to be there for another day. I think some of you may be having memories of that too. So the poem is very evocative for that. There's practice of washing in cold water. I had another practice when I lived at Tassajara, which was going into the creek every day, winter and summer. I made it a little easier on myself because I would generally be in the steam room first, and I'd go back into the hot plunge afterwards. But nevertheless, going into the creek every day, when it was swollen in the winter, I'd have to hold on to the handrail to immerse myself when the creek was running hard.

[04:11]

On a hot day, obviously, going into the creek is quite a pleasure to cool down. But there's still that one moment right before you jump in, which is like... Am I going to do it? Yes, I'm going to do it. And that yes, I will, that's a part of the thing at Tassahara, part of the practice. We often say that, or I often heard it said, that it didn't necessarily matter who was leading the practice period. The real teacher was the schedule, the monastic schedule. So you don't want to wake up every morning at a ridiculous time. You don't necessarily want to go to the Zendo every time. Even when I was used to the regular schedule, I found that stretching that to do sesshin was a bit of an imposition. Maybe you just get tired of doing orioke all the time. Maybe you don't really want to work in the kitchen. A kitchen where it would be cold enough that you would go into the walk-in to warm up on a cold day.

[05:16]

Maybe you didn't want to be kokyo. I remember when I was first asked to lead the chant, I struggled with it because I felt historically that I didn't have a voice. I was not encouraged to project myself loudly growing up in England. And I remember talking with the Tanto at the time about that. And it took some time to realize that it wasn't just about me or how I felt about it or what I wanted. But to be in that role, to lead the chant in the morning, to be expressing the Dharma, whether you want it to or not. So we practice choosing to make the unwanted wanted. And so by showing up for the schedule, by showing up every morning, getting out of bed every morning, sitting every day, then you get to choose to make the unwanted wanted. And sometimes you do want to do it, but sometimes you don't. And one thing that really...

[06:20]

I learned at Tassari that getting to do what you want all the time is kind of overrated. And actually there is an incredible value in having your time and your options constrained like that. And I often think of Suzuki Roshi, who... founded San Francisco Zen Center and moved into this building with the community in 1969. And he was often dealing with young folks who were living the 60s lifestyle with their ideas of freedom. And he was constantly reminding people in talks that freedom without this sense of discipline, without this sense of structure, without this sense of having a Limit on your activity. I was not real freedom. And recently I came across a talk in a group that I was studying with from October 1965, so a whole 60 years ago, which in those days would have been back at the Sakoji Temple in Japantown.

[07:34]

And he's talking about the practice of sitting all day together. I think at those times there were regular monthly one-day sittings, and I think... Quite a lot of the people were coming time and time again. So there was a developing community. He said, our vital freedom will be like a running water originating from a mountain, passing through valleys and fields, reaching the sea. There is no freedom for the water to return to the mountain. But at the same time, there is vital freedom. This kind of life is called religious life. To attain it is to practice Zazen without the idea of gaining. So the freedom we get is the freedom within these constraints, the freedom of running water going from the mountain to the sea. I'm not an expert on Chinese characters, but I've always understood that the character for Dharma has some notion of water finding its natural level.

[08:42]

That is the natural law. Water runs from the mountain down to the sea. And this vital freedom, whenever I hear the word vital, I always think of Dogen, a Japanese founder who always talked about the vitality, the vital moment. So this aliveness that comes through the restriction, through getting up every morning, through sitting, through doing Oryoki, through working in the kitchen, through being the Kokyo, through being the door watch, through being the person who does the recordings. This kind of life is called religious life. We choose it, but then we submit to it. And we practice Zazen without the idea of gaining. Something that Suzuki Roshi said again and again and again. So again, I think he was often... confronted with these students in the 60s who had this notion of freedom and what freedom meant, which seemed to be sticking it to the system.

[09:50]

But 60 years on, what does our freedom look like? Is it the freedom to be scrolling endlessly? Is it the freedom to be tuning out? Is it the freedom to be just going within and ignoring what is going on around us? Last month I had the opportunity to go down to Tassahara for the day for the Shusou ceremony where the head monk for the practice period gets to answer questions from everybody. It's always a wonderful ceremony. I sometimes think that Zen Center functions as a teacher factory and every Shusou is a freshly minted teacher. Shuso Gentoku Mike, somebody I have practiced with at Tassahara over the years and always knew him to be a wholehearted student, somebody who would get up and sit and do what was asked, take on responsibility, give himself wholeheartedly to the practice.

[11:07]

And then as so often happens when you get to be sitting on the Dharma seat for the first time at Shuso and sitting in the middle, of the ceremony fielding everybody's questions. You get to see not just wholeheartedness, but open-heartedness. This is a quality that I think that the former Shusos, those who have been through this particular mill or ringer, they're always looking out for this open-heartedness, this ability to meet people's questions exactly where they are. And so these two qualities, these wholeheartedness and openheartedness, I think, are what we can develop and what we can practice through the restrictions of our practice, through the periods of Sazen. And again, when I read Suzuki Roshi's talks,

[12:17]

he's often batting away any idea about enlightenment, or attaining enlightenment. I think, again, people had this idea of something they could get, and that Suzuki Roshi was a person who could tell you how to get it. But the word that he used quite often, and that Sojourner Weitzman, the late abbot at Berkeley's end center, also used, is composure. And there's something about facing the difficult things, facing our restrictions, facing our limitation, pushing ourselves through wholeheartedly that leaves us with this kind of composure, which is how we meet the unwanted. And we can think about the things that we might feel are unwanted now, whether it's the fires in L.A. or a new government coming in, or maybe even You know, some people often say, dealing with their families, how can I deal with my family?

[13:22]

How can practice help me with that? When we feel that we have maybe no control over climate or government or other people, how can we still meet these difficult situations? And this is something that we do all the time in Zazen. Whatever we're sitting quietly, something will arise. maybe more or less comfortable. The quieter we get, the deeper the things come up from, I think. And so we're confronted with all these parts of ourselves that may seem unwanted. You know, the voices that say, you're not good enough. You're not the person who could be doing this. Who do you think you are? Whatever voices you have going on in your head that put you down, wherever they came from, And you keep sitting with those and meeting them, making those unwanted voices wanted, or at least a little more welcome.

[14:28]

And we also practice respect for the objects around us, whether it's our robes or our bowls or the bells, the chant books. But we can extend it to everything. There's a famous Suzuki Roshi talk about scraping the dining room chairs across the floor, not showing enough respect for the chairs. So if someone's in the dining room scraping the chairs, and I hope the chairs are still here. I think they were the original chairs from 1922 when the building was built. Pick up the chair. Treat the chair with respect. Treat everything with respect. Allow everything to have its value as part of the absolute that is manifesting in this moment. And doing this beyond our ideas of convenient or inconvenient or good or bad or necessary or unnecessary. Here is the world showing up for us. And can we show up for the world as well?

[15:39]

Just like we do in Zazen. I think right now we need people to be showing up to set this kind of example. Now that the building is open again, people will start coming again. We can start being a beacon once more from Zen Center. It seems that perhaps fewer people are willing to go through the kinds of hardship that a practice spirit at Tassahara offers, to go through those difficulties. and find the wholeheartedness and openheartedness that can arise from that. But I think what we can do, those of us who are here, those of us who are connected as part of the Sangha, we can be there as examples. In the same way that when I came to Zen Center, I was inspired by the examples of the elders who were here 25 years ago, their steadiness, their maturity.

[16:44]

their composure. I saw this openness and settledness, and in many cases, a freedom from the tyranny of preferences. We all have our opinions, we all have our ideas, we all have our foibles, but being able to put those aside and meet person, situation, object, wholeheartedly and openheartedly. So when the whole world is distracted, can we be present? When the whole world seems to be in the thrall of AI, can we be human? When money and power seem to be the most seductive and prevalent things that people are chasing, Can we be kind?

[17:45]

I was talking with the people in LA today and remembering Rebecca Solnit's book about altruism and how people come together in disaster times, on times of real difficulties. We all have this ability and this capacity to show up for each other. And the Zen Center community is a very powerful community. People at the practice period who I remember from my first summer at Tassajara more than 20 years ago. Maybe they've been gone in that time. They're still connected with the community. And everyone who is there and who is here can be a beacon to others. And even as we lose people like Peter Schneider who have that direct connection with Suzuki Roshi, was one of his priests and somebody who interviewed him quite extensively in 1969 to kind of tease out stories from his earlier life. Through the transmission, the face-to-face transmission that we practice here, this living together warm-heartedly, openly, we get to embody the teaching.

[19:05]

And whether people are here for this face-to-face transmission or online, we can still be offering this example in this practice. So even now, decades after, I wash my face with cold water. Not for discipline, nor memory, nor the icy awakening slap, but to practice choosing to make the unwanted wanted. I think I thought of this poem because I was sick just before Christmas. I had a fever and spent a couple of days lying in bed, not really able to do anything. And I remember thinking, I'll start thinking about my talk when I get better.

[20:09]

And then when I started looking at some of my notes, I realized that I'd actually, one night before I'd gone to sleep, dictated some voice notes into my phone about this poem and some of my thoughts about it. And I'd completely forgotten about it in the meantime. So nobody wants to be sick over Christmas. I certainly didn't want to be sick. I really wanted to have a nice, relaxing time. Instead, I got to hibernate for a week. But that's what happens. We have plans and we get to practice with what actually arises. And it seems that, you know, through a quirk of the calendar, I often get to give a talk around New Year. Last year and year before [...] that. And I think, you know, when was the last time I was feeling optimistic about the new year? You know, maybe in 2020, you know, but that was until right before the pandemic. I think in 2021, I spoke right before January the 6th, so there was a sense of optimism about a new president coming in and the vaccines, but still not being out of the woods.

[21:19]

And I think still we're really not out of the woods from the pandemic. I think we all are still suffering from it. And then obviously last year, you know, this building closed down and the sense of going inwards or dispersing and closing down. So now we can open up again. And even if the wider world is maybe a little challenging in many areas, we can open the doors here and be a beacon again. For everyone who needs the practice, everyone who has this notion that maybe making the unwanted wanted is a way to live life. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma Talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[22:22]

May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[22:25]

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